– prepare for an attempt to beat my Joe Record of 3:56 in the San Antonio Marathon in mid November

While I’m glad to be home, the number of tasks begging for attention is overwhelming. I feel like a crustacean at Red Lobster…like I’m ready to get boiled and eaten.

It’s when I’m pulling what little hair I have out while slamming my “Easy Button” over and over that I turn to productivity experts for help.

How about some show & tell? Here’s who I use:

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity’>David Allen: Getting Things Done– No book has informed my ability to quickly complete tasks more than Mr. Allen, the guru of the GTD movement. I constantly aspire to the Allen goal to “be like water” and flow with the situation. To do this, I have to maintain rigorous systems to find data at a moment’s notice and stay on top of critical tasks. I’ll be re-reading Allen’s Getting Things Done over the next two weeks to sharpen this saw.

Stanford Study: Multitasking – I have to remind myself to stick to one task at a time. Forget the list building behind this current activity (as I write this there are clothes from the trip in the dryer, a foyer full of bags from the car and a list of emails I promised to return today). This Stanford study proved what I think we might have known all along: trying to multitask muddles your brain and actually costs you time. We aren’t wired for three tasks at once, no matter how hard we want to be.

Those are my resources for productivity. Try them out if you’re looking for well-tested material to help you shovel bigger loads of tasks at once. I think you’ll like them.

I’m curious: what are your favorite texts on productivity?

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